Word: colombia
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...Colombia's political leaders are being challenged by the drug dealers, some of Panama's leaders are the drug dealers. Two federal indictments were unsealed in Florida last month charging General Manuel Antonio Noriega with an assortment of crimes, among them drug trafficking and money laundering. Witnesses who testified before Senator Kerry's subcommittee charged that ! Noriega and his cronies institutionalized corruption, putting the country's military services, corporations, banks and airfields at the disposal of the traffickers in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars...
...described some of the services provided by Noriega and his associates in exchange for a percentage of the drug proceeds: transit from airports and docks in guarded cars and armored trucks, round-the-clock bodyguards for leading dealers, limousines, apartments, bank accounts, even planes to fly to and from Colombia to drum up new business...
...location, only a few hours' flying time from Florida, and its many secluded airstrips make Honduras an ideal transit point. Last November a shipment of mahogany boards arriving in Florida from Honduras was packed with 8,052 lbs. of cocaine. A few days later the Honduran military attache in Colombia, Colonel William Said Speer, was linked to traffickers when Cartel Member Ochoa was arrested while driving Said's $80,000 sports car in Colombia. "The upper echelon of our military has been corrupted," charges a Honduran official...
...Colombian imprint deepened when Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a Honduran drug dealer, returned from Colombia in 1986 and settled in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. Matta, who has been described as a chief contact between the Medellin suppliers and Mexican smugglers, is wanted by the DEA in connection with the 1985 murder in Mexico of DEA Agent Enrique Camarena Salazar. In Honduras, which does not allow extradition, Matta is living the good life, flamboyantly dispensing money to the poor who line up outside his palatial estate. His assets are said to amount to more than $1 billion; he reportedly paid...
Until recently it was assumed in Mexico that the country's drug problems were not as grave as Colombia's. Local moguls oversaw marijuana and poppy harvests; many made money; no one got hurt. Then on Feb. 1, when 22 suspected narcotics traffickers were arrested in three Mexican states, it became increasingly clear that Mexico had become yet another way station for Medellin cartel business. Six of the detainees were Colombians believed to be midlevel operatives for the cartel. When Mexican federal police inspected a warehouse the Colombians used in Sonora, they found 100 AK-47 assault rifles...